The Hindu : National : Indian brains push Cisco router into Guinness record book

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 06, 2004

National

National

Indian brains push Cisco router into Guinness record book

By Anand Parthasarathy

Rajiv Deshmukh(inset) who helped create the key chips that fuel the world's faster router, Cisco's CRS-1.

BANGALORE, JULY 5. The world's largest, fastest router — a device that connects computer networks and helps them swap packets of data — will enter the next edition of the Guinness Book of Records, fuelled by key processor chips designed by the India-born hardware engineer Rajiv Deshmukh and his United States-based team at Cisco.

The networking product leader's Carrier Routing System (CRS-1), which is specifically tailored to Internet and data service providers, shifts data at a whopping 92 terabits a second — at least 100 times larger than any offering existing. (A tera bit is a trillion bits, that is a million, million bits)

While the Guinness Records organisation, certified the CRS-1 last week, as the bandwidth-gobbling "Bakasura," of its time, Cisco interestingly, chose to make India, one of the first targets outside the U.S., for this product, with the promise that it is "future proof" for at least a decade. The carrier routing system will become available here this month, announced, Cisco's San Jose (U.S.)-based Vice-President (Marketing) Kulvinder ("Kelly") Ahuja.

In its announcement of the Guinness accolade, the company saluted the crucial role played by Rajiv Deshmukh, Director of Hardware Engineering and his team, who realised the crucial Silicon Packet Processor (SPP) chip, as well as all other application-special integrated circuits (ASICs) that helped the router achieve its zippy speed. "The numbers behind SPP, put Mr. Deshmukh in the big leagues of chip design," says Cisco.

"The chip incorporates more than 38 million logic gates, one million flip flops, eight million bits of embedded memory, and 1,600 signal lines that push data in and out of the chip at gigahertz frequencies (that is, a billion times per second)."

Rangnath Salgame, Cisco's President for India and SAARC, told The Hindu at the formal unveiling in Delhi recently, that the CRS-1 which cost half a million dollars to develop, involved the collective efforts over a four year period, of 500 engineers — many with the company's Bangalore-based research and development centre.

The asking price? The entry level international pricing is in the region of $ 450,000 — a cool Rs. 2 crore equivalent .

But then, that kind of money buys the ability to handle 3 billion telephone calls per second, or transfer the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in 4.6 seconds, compared to 82 years it would take with a 56 kilobits per second (KBPS) modem that the rest of use to access the Internet.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National